Another weekend, another round of house photos. I've decided to do the dam panorama only
once a month, and have retired the two views I mentioned last week (first two images) and
replaced them with the third:

So finally Palestine has gained some recognition in the world. And promptly Israel
(“we only want peace”) retaliates by authorizing the construction of still more fortified
settlements in what is supposed to become the Palestinian state. How can they get away with
it? How can the US continue supporting a country that so rigorously suppresses a neighbour?

My objection here isn't to the Israeli people or their right to be there. The government
doesn't necessarily speak for its people, any more than the Australian government's horrible
human rights abuses against asylum seekers reflects with my views. But particularly a state
founded after the catastrophe of the Nazi persecution of the Jews should show compassion,
not persecution. It would be in their own best interests.

On the German list a side
topic sprang up: Subhash wanted a tutorial on using Hugin, and then ran into trouble with a
series of photos not originally intended as a panorama and thus not taken with a panorama
bracket. And he couldn't get them to stitch. For the fun of it, I took a look. The photos
were taken with an Olympus
E-5 and a Zuiko digital ED 7-14mm f/4 at 7 mm focal length:

My first attempt at stitching them ran into trouble because panomatic couldn't find
any control points for the fourth image. I added them manually, and all was well, though
the lack of panorama bracket gave me an average error of 2.1 pixel and a maximum of 6.7:

But Subhash had been using the built-in cpfind, and that was a different business.
It found control points between the third and the fourth images, but not between the fourth
and the fifth. But at the same time, it reported that the focal length of the lens was 7.92
mm, something that I've seen before. Tried several approaches, in the course of which I
discovered that the recalculated focal length varied a little, between about 7.88 and 7.96
mm. Resetting it didn't help, and try as I might, I couldn't get a better image than this:

But Subhash has also been complaining about the quality of Hugin. Is commercial
software better? Tried a demo version of PtGui
“Pro” (and yes, there is a non-“Pro” version). It wasn't much more reassuring.
First, it didn't want to recognize my images:

It seems that it insisted on using the name, rather than the contents, to decide what
the image was. It added blank images to the panorama anyway, along with a focal length of
38.6 mm that it seems to have plucked out of nowhere. Linked the photos to the same name
with .jpeg at the end:

That's three completely unrelated attempts at guessing focal length, something
that Hugin never has. Set it to 7 mm and let it find the control points, which it
did an order of magnitude faster than Hugin, and found control points for all
images—the only advantage I see so far. But there's something familiar about the results:

Again there's an additional corner in the image, and it has changed the estimate of focal
length. All in all, not sufficient. On the positive side, control point detection
is much faster, but on the negative side:

It seems to have extreme problems with things as simple as extracting EXIF data.

It relies on name, rather than content, to guess what is in the files.

It runs on Microsoft.

It doesn't produce results as good as panomatic.

It costs 149 € or $200 for a personal license, and $467 for a company license!

To be fair, it offers some features that Hugin doesn't, but I didn't bother after
that. There are other panorama programs, so decided to try them. The first I came across
was autostitch. This seems to be a bare-bones product, strangely marketed by the
Computer Science Department of the
University of Bath. It didn't want to recognize
my files either, not even the ones with .jpeg hung off the end. It insisted on them
having a truncated .jpg extension:

To be clear: both the 00s (for example) are identically the same file, a link
and not a copy. And this brain-dead software thinks one name is of a “File” and the other
of a “JPEG File” (and not “JPG File”). It's not clear whether that is Autostitch's or
Microsoft's fault, but why do people have to hide and mutilate file names and try to guess
the content from the name? Tried stitching, and got what looked like only a partial
panorama, but while trying to find a way around it, ran into more pain than I could handle,
and gave up. Certainly I haven't found any reason to buy a commercial product yet.

While working on the panoramas, ran into an old enemy: the X hang with the cursor jumping
between the screens. Not once, but twice in quick succession. I suppose I should report
the bug, but they want me to log in, and I'm not sure I want to share my account details
with them.

I've been neglecting my work in the garden recently. The weeds haven't been neglecting
theirs, and at the moment things seem to be going backwards. Now that summer's here,
hopefully there will be less rain, and I'll be able to make more progress. Spent a couple
of hours today weeding in the south-east part of the eastern garden, where I've been
planning to plant some ground covers once I get rid of the weeds. It could happen Real Soon
Now.

My attempts with commercial panorama stitchers yesterday were more based on names I
remembered rather than any particular recommendation. Today I took at look at Reinhard
Wagner's “Profibuch HDR-Fotografie” (there's that “Pro” word again), which also talks about
panoramas. And he uses Autopano “Pro” (the
“Pro” apparently means “no frills”; there's also an Autopano “Giga”,
designed for larger panoramas). Like PtGui
“Pro”, the control point detector ran faster than any of Hugin's detectors, and found control points
for all the images; I'm coming to the conclusion that the difference is with Hugin,
not the others. But it, too, had problems with Subhash's panorama. The preview shows it:

But I've seen differences between preview and result before, so I stitched it, ending up
with a file with the emetic
name c:\Users\grog\Desktop\[Group 3]-00_06-7 images.jpg, in a directory
completely unrelated to the source. Yes, I could have set the destination before stitching,
but I wasn't expecting it. The result looked reasonable at first sight:

It's not until you look more carefully that it becomes apparent that it's Just Plain Broken.
The shelf on the left goes beyond the (only partially shown) corner of the room, and the
planks on the floor run at an angle to each other:

For some reason, Autopano decides to convert the focal length of the lens to a 35 mm
equivalent, and it also claims that the lens is a fisheye. But it doesn't change the focal
length like cpfind and PtGui:

All in all, it's clear that this set of photos is a particularly difficult one. Tried with
last week's verandah-centre panorama, which it managed without difficulties. But I make two
different views of this panorama: one for direct viewing
with Miller Cylindrical
projection, and one
with Equirectangular
projection for the animated version. And I
couldn't find either of those on Autopano's list of projections. The best I could get was
cylindrical, and even then I couldn't find a way to move the centre point of the panorama.
I suppose it must be possible, but there's only so much time I'm prepared to invest in these
things.

I've put in a ticket with Internode support about the continued poor quality of service I've had with my wireless Internet connection,
which continues. I made the mistake of supplying
not only the obvious information, like the remote termination requests, but also supporting
information like the frequent cell hopping. So I get a reply saying that cell hopping is
normal, and ignoring the real problem. From my reply to them:

This clearly shows that the other end is terminating the connection. You may like to
compare with RFC 1661, section
3.7:

3.7. Link Termination Phase

PPP can terminate the link at any time. This might happen because of
the loss of carrier, authentication failure, link quality failure,
the expiration of an idle-period timer, or the administrative closing
of the link.

Clearly in this case the cause is not loss of carrier (or I wouldn't receive the terminate
request), or authentication failure (wrong state). Link quality failure also seems
unlikely, since there is no associated change in signal strength. To the best of my
knowledge there is no idle period timer with this service, as evidenced by the fact that I
can stay up for weeks at a time. So this must be an administrative closing of the link.
And that is Optus' decision, and nobody else's. But in any case, the log
files will show this request, and hopefully the reason. If you can't find this
information, presumably you don't have access to the correct logs. That would be a reason
to ask Optus to look at the matter.

So I get a response back which seems completely out of keeping with the Internode I know:

It is normal for even a fixed line ADSL service to drop out up to 3 times per day, and 3G
services are not intended to be a fixed line replacement. It is not likely that Optus are
terminating your session, and as the service does not appear to be dropping out at an
excessive level, we will be unable to log a fault.

Not likely? No explanation why, when I've provided continuous information to that effect.
Abut the only question is whether it's Optus or Internode that is dropping the connection.
The more I think about it, the more likely it is that Internode is dropping the connection.
And it's neither normal nor acceptable for a fixed ADSL line to drop out up to 3 times a
day. If Internode offered that level of support, they'd be out of business. It seems that
there's a new wind blowing in Internode now. That's a pity.

It's pretty much exactly what I expected it to be, and it works about as well as I
expected. One thing's clear: the less accurate version is completely adequate. With the
ball head it's almost impossible to get it completely level; maybe something with adjusting
screws would be a better choice.

Yvonne off at the crack of dawn today to Rokeby this morning, round 5:45. A good two hours later
she called me from Melbourne, where she should have been at least half an hour earlier:
somehow the GPS navigator had hung, and she had to reset it—the first time ever! After
that, apparently, it worked, but she had lost some of the settings and (I think) it tried to
take her the shortest rather than the fastest way. That's fatal in the East of Melbourne,
but fortunately she ignored it and made it there with only an hour delay.

Into town for a number of things today: my new bread pan has finally arrived from Hong Kong,
after only 3 weeks, and I had to pick it up. It's tiny! But yes, the dimensions are what
they say they are, so I had just underestimated the size difference from my current pan:

It's strange that this is one of the biggest pans available on eBay. Do people really make such tiny loaves? Still,
the height is right, so we'll see how it works out.

Also to the Ballarat
Pump Shop with the pressure cell from our water pump. As I had feared, they confirmed
that the bladder had ruptured and they wouldn't repair it (any more), since it was just too
much work. So I had to spend $120 on a new one, which turned out to have too long a thread
to attach properly to the pump, so I had to replace the old one—a good thing I didn't leave
it there. Not the first time I'll have to go back there to get things to work.

While in town, dropped in to the Friends of the
Ballarat Botanical Gardens with intent to attach an Ethernet cable for the third
computer and a USB cable extension for Lorraine Powell, who hates fiddling round behind the
computer. It turned out that the third computer already had a cable—it looks like I had
done it myself and forgotten. And I couldn't attach the USB cable because the computer only
had two sockets at the back, and they were both in use. It's a funny looking little metal
cube with strange controls on the front—I'm continually looking for the power button—so I
investigated and discovered a couple of secret flaps, one hiding a DVD drive, and the other
a set of connectors, including two USB sockets! So I didn't need to do anything there
either.

But I wasn't done. Lorraine wanted to download an image from the web and send it to
somebody via email—the image itself, not the URL. How do you do that with Microsoft? I was
just about to start braving “Outlook” when it occurred to me that we have a Gmail account, and that I had already learnt to use it. So
connected up to that. But how to add the image? There's a button “Attach a file”, but that
does exactly that: it attaches a local file. How do I get the thing on the local machine?
Normally I'd do something like

But that doesn't work with Microsoft. What do you do? Genevieve knew: “open” Microsoft “Word” and copy it there, then send the “Word” document as an attachment. And she
was really upset at my horror about the solution! But I didn't know any better solution, so
we tried sending it like that. And somehow we got timeouts; maybe it was a combination of
the Microsoft bloat, the slow machine and the slow ADSL line. But that was as much as I
could stand, and I left the matter in Genevieve's capable hands. I later checked: yes, they
had sent the message:

At the next computer, Rudolf Huebner was trying to access the web. And it kept giving
popups about out-of-date virus software or some such, and I gave up with that one too. I
told him that I didn't use Microsoft, and he said something that impressed me: “Yes, I find
this all rather neolithic. I use Apple too”.

I suppose it's par for the course that he didn't consider a different alternative, but on
the other hand it's interesting that even people of the age of the Friends—most are older
than I—are moving to Apple. I'm relatively certain that it's a sizeable majority, and I
wonder why. I'm reminded of a opinion piece I read
recently, titled “Microsoft has failed”. It's interesting, but a little one-sided. For
example, it doesn't mention the reason I'm locked in to Microsoft: it's the only platform I
can easily run DxO
Optics “Pro” on. Many other people use Microsoft for the same reason, either because
it's the only option, or it's just “easier”: most people aren't as stubborn as I am.

Relatively slow day today. Did some baking, a little weeding in the garden, and that was
about that. Yvonne back in the evening without any further
mishaps. The GPS navigator seemed correctly configured, and I can't understand why it
wanted to take her a different route yesterday.

Everybody uses Facebook today, even most of
the people I know. And I spend a lot of time talking in IRC, which is arguably something
very similar, and I also keep this diary. But try as I might, I can't get to like Facebook.
Why? There are a number of reasons:

The format is neither like a conversation (IRC) nor like letter-writing (email). It
falls somewhere in between. Arguably there's nothing wrong with that, but I can't find
a use for it.

It's closer to a diary or a blog, but it's “here today, gone tomorrow”, and that for a
very generous definition of “tomorrow”. In practice, if you don't see something in a
couple of hours, you don't see it. So it's not really very good for keeping up with
events. By contrast, I continually discover things in my diaries of over 40 years ago,
and wish I had written more detail.

On the other hand, Facebook itself keeps all this information forever, and though I
don't really have anything to hide, I'm uncomfortable with the idea, especially since
they use it for making decisions.

The last point is interesting. Some time ago Yvonne (who
is not my friend on Facebook) updated her profile and added that she was married (to
me). I know when it happened, because something in the Facebook profiles decided
that this was our wedding day, and it added it to my profile:

So for the fun of it I tried it out again and created a fake
user, Maria Theresa (the mother
of Maria Antonia) and married
her to me. That didn't work for some reason, and I forgot about the whole thing. But
Facebook didn't, and keeps sending her messages with texts like “You have more friends than
you think” or “Interesting pages on Facebook”:

I'm amazed at what Facebook thinks is interesting. Clearly they have very little
information about Maria Theresa—just her name, portrait and (faked, of course) date of birth
(30 August 1912); but even that should be enough to identify her and decide that, at 100
years of age, she probably doesn't want to go to the Omni Fitness &
Nutrition North Ryde, 1000 km away.
Google identifies her positively based on the portrait alone.

Another day with little to show for itself. A little more work in the garden, catching up
with not just weeds but some particularly vigorous sweet peas, which have been taking over
much of the north garden. Hopefully the drier weather will help me in my fight against the
weeds.

Yet another day where I did (almost) nothing. Why? Because I can? The weather certainly
helped: the last few days have been unseasonally cool, so today was unseasonably warm to
make up for it. Managed a bit more weeding, in the process unearthing
a Delphinium „Völkerfrieden“ (World
Peace) that had been almost completely hidden by
a Salvia microphylla next to
it. It's still a little wobbly (that's a bamboo rod holding it up):

While having breakfast this morning, noticed an interesting coloured flower at the top of
the garden arch: yellow. Further investigation showed that it was a weed, one of a kind
that usually grows to 40 cm or so. Not this one. It was well over 2 metres high:

The Alyogyne huegelii isn't
looking overly happy at the moment. Given the treatment it has had, that's not overly surprising. And it
seems that at this time of year it's not in its best either—the cuttings I have made are all
looking less happy than they were a couple of months ago. But maybe there's more. Insects:

We see the first kind wandering around back to back for weeks at this time of the year,
apparently locked in a protracted mating ritual. They're about 1.5 cm long, and I haven't
seen them do any damage. The others are about 2 mm long (and thus present a significant
challenge to photography). No idea what they're doing, but it's not beyond the bounds of
possibility that they're contributing to the state of the tree.

They're clearly eating the petals. The good news is that they all respond
to Pyrethrum.

Keeping the Alyogyne upright is also a problem. I've tied it to a star dropper with baling
twine, but that eats into the bark. I've tried wrapping various things around it. Plastic
sheet unravels amazingly fast, sometimes in seconds, and I haven't found a way to keep it
together. So then I tried some of the metal straps we used to tie the parts of the verandah
together. That stays in place, but somehow the twine slips:

There's another round of “how much should I spend” going round the German Olympus forum, this time about polarizing filters. The general
opinion on the forum is “you gets what you pays for”, clearly an attitude that has kept
companies like Novoflex in business. In the
case of polarizing filters, there are three main arguments for more expensive variants:

Better optical quality: cheap filters distort the image.

Less flare. Cheap filters exhibit a lot of flare.

Colour casts. Cheap filters can change the color of the image.

My experience has been that the cheap filters I have bought have been satisfactory on all
counts. Here a comparison taken with and without my el-cheapo $9 polarizing filter.
Mouseover alternation shows the difference better, and also that my el-cheapo tripod managed
to move the images while I was removing the filter:

Recently we saw a film Julie &
Julia, about Julia Child, a
cook of whom I had barely heard,
and Julie Powell, who cooked all the
recipes from Julia
Child's “Mastering
the Art of French Cooking”. I'm not overly interested in American views of French
cooking: we have our own originally French books such as La cuisine de
Mère Saint Ange, which I trust more than any foreign book on the subject. But the
story was interesting, so I went through the catalogues of the local libraries and ended up
with six books, two of which proved to be the same. Discovered that “Mastering the Art of
French Cooking” is in two volumes, and I only got the second.

What was I expecting? Mainly, I was curious. The film implied that the other two authors
of the book (Simone Beck
and Louisette Bertholle) were
displaced and that it appeared only in Child's name, but that's not correct. Bertholle is
missing from the second volume, but that's because she really wasn't involved, but Beck is
listed as the first author of the first volume.

And? The recipes? Yes, it's American, and some of the statements are amazing:

P 55: Until the 1800s... all bread was made with a levain, meaning dough
left over from the previous batch.

Nonsense! Sourdough predates concepts like “French” or “American”. It was the only way
to make bread until 200 years ago, and they mentioned it earlier. I wonder what gave
rise to this misconception.

P 71: Slide them onto the hot asbestos.

This is the first mention of asbestos. The idea of putting food onto asbestos boggles
the mind. From the context, it seems that she's talking about baking the bread on
quarry tiles to improve the result. Why asbestos suddenly comes into the equation is
baffling.

P 181: Filet of beef Wellington

Now that's a typical French name for filet de bœuf en croûte!

And, of course, there's the inevitable use of inappropriate measures, such as cups and tablespoons, that thoroughly confuse me.
But apart from that there are some surprising positive sides: nearly 100 pages on bread and
other bakery, and over 50
on charcuterie, something that you
won't find in French cookbooks. As they put it:

The average French household ... does no bread making, and there is no need to because
every neighbourhood has its own boulangerie... Thus you cannot even find a bread
pan in a French household supply store, and there are no French recipes for home-made
bread.

And that's exactly the point. We're not in France, we're in AmericaAustralia,
and both bread and charcuterie are a real problem. The recipes here look
interesting, so much so that I'll probably get hold of a copy of the book. Who would have
thought that?

That's only one of the books, of course. I didn't think the others (all newer) were nearly
as good. But even one good cookbook is worth finding.

Chris Yeardley had cause for celebration today. She has finished her 4 year computer course
in 3 years, with High Distinctions all along. Yana has also
completed her Bachelor of Arts and Diploma in German course, also a 4 year course—in ten
years! Still, it's good that she went back and completed things.

So today Chris brought some champagnebubbly to celebrate, and then we had
dinner—and I had forgotten the flowers! But we were able to make up for that:

The weather yesterday was pretty terrible for panoramic photos: bright sunshine and high
winds, so did my house photos today. And
again a few more experiments.

The first: I've been thinking about leveling my panoramas for a while, and bought an
electronic level a while back. The problem
there has proved to be the difficulty of adjusting the head to get things really level.
I've thought of
several Heath-Robinson methods do
achieve better control over the leveling process, but then a more obvious question occurred
to me: how level does it need to be? To try that, I took two separate series of photos of
the north garden, one aligned as accurately as I could with my el-cheapo ball head, and one
where the bubble on the level was touching the surrounding ring. I later measured the
accuracy with the electronic level: the “level” was 0.25° off level, while the other was
3.5° off level, a considerable proportion of the 5° adjustment that the Manfrotto leveling
base offers. And the results? Not quite what I expected. I took them all from the same
vantage point, so they could easily be stitched together. I deliberately cropped so that
the edges were visible, and this is what I got:

The images show exactly the same field of view. Running the cursor
over either image chances it to the other one. Clearly there's very little
difference, though the first (skewed) one is marginally more impacted. Basically, though,
this suggests that the required accuracy is really not very high, and that even a cheap
level is sufficient.

The other experiment was to add a nadir to the “verandah centre” panorama. I've seen some
clever ideas with tripods at an angle, but I didn't have that, so I just did it hand-held.
As expected, that wasn't the easiest subject, and the results were substandard:

Managed to get some work done in the garden in the afternoon. The last two tomato seedlings
in the greenhouse were ready for planting, so into the veggie patch and planted them,
marvelling at how both the potatoes and the weeds have proliferated. It looks like it's
time for Glyphosate for the front half
of the patch, but the rest isn't looking bad. Spent some time removing lots of weeds.
There may be hope yet.

For various reasons, I've had more to do with the calendar(1) program than I would have expected, notably when Chris Yeardley tidied it up for a university project. And
then at the end of last month I discovered this:

25 Nov* First Sunday of Advent (4th Sunday before Christmas)

That's nonsense, of course. The earliest date for the first Sunday
in Advent is 27 November. So what did it
say for the real first Sunday in Advent, 2 December?

2 Dec* First Sunday of Advent (4th Sunday before Christmas)

What's that nonsense? The real issue is that calendar is too stupid to understand
the concept of Advent. The best that can be done (and what is done) is:

11/SunLast First Sunday of Advent (4th Sunday before Christmas)
12/SunFirst First Sunday of Advent (4th Sunday before Christmas)

And that is so stupid. calendar already understands things like Easter (in
two different incarnations) and now it even knows
about Chinese New Year, as I
discovered while looking at it. So why not Christmas? Because I'm too lazy.

And then Jaakko Heinonen posted
a message
on one of the FreeBSD mailing lists, citing
numerous problem reports, but not the issue with the C preprocessor that I noticed
last month. Decided it was
time to take a look.

What a surprise! In release 7, calendar had a total of 1476 lines of code. Now it's
3613! What happened? Clearly a makeover. The entire parsing of the input file has been
rewritten—without removing the use of cpp. Took a look at that and found one bug,
where negative offsets such as Thurs-1 didn't work, but not before I found this
marvel of efficient coding:

This code converts a decimal number with an explicit sign to binary, as long as the number
is in the range -100 to 100 and is written without leading zeroes. I don't think I've ever
seen anything like it. Who said that “open source” software is better because many eyes
look at it? I'm not sure that even two eyes have ever looked at this before.

That's a fatal disk error on the root file system. On a virtual machine? There's clearly a
real disk behind it, and that's on eureka. But eureka didn't report any
problems. Is this a real disk error or something in the mind of VirtualBox's disk emulation?

Spent most of the day looking at calendar(1). What I had expected to be a simple bug fix goes much further;
partially code is missing, in many cases it's (almost) duplicated, and I'm left wondering
whether to apply a band-aid or rewrite the parser. But then, there's always a tendency to
reinvent the wheel. More thought needed.

Today was bread baking day again, the first time since I got my new non-stick bread pan. To
be on the safe side, I baked two loaves, one in the old pan, and one in the new. A good
thing too: “non-stick” appears to be a pious wish rather than anything to do with reality.
Even after running a knife around the entire sides of the loaf, I couldn't get it out. It
stuck to the bottom too. Finally removed a small section, which pretty much fell apart. I
need to think about how to remove the rest.

Subhash is still having problems with Hugin, so I got him to send me his latest batch. He has asked me not to show
them, but there's not much to see: It Worked For Me. Why not for him? More investigation
needed.

Subhash sent me his photos to look at overnight, along with a project file. The photos
stitched perfectly! The project file, on the other hand, was a complete disaster. He
described what he had done, and it all made sense. So what's the problem? He keeps all his
images in DNG format, and
converts them to TIFF before processing. I
don't have the same tools as he does: I extract the raw image from the DNG using the Adobe
tool and then process it with DxO Optics “Pro”. But I've
seen problems with TIFF images and Huginbefore.
Could it be something similar?

Tried converting his images to TIFF. It wasn't simple: I know there's a way to select
output format and name with DxO, but I couldn't find it. None of the menus on any of the
tabs showed me anything. In principle it should have been on this screen, “Processing”,
which needs to be enlarged (click 3 times) to be legible. But I couldn't find it.

So the bread I baked yesterday in the new non-stick pan stuck to the pan. Yesterday I
extracted a small slice, some of which didn't self-destruct. Today I considered the options
for removing the rest, and heated the pan from underneath to toast and hopefully toughen the
base. Then I was able to remove half the bread, but it's not clear the effort was worth it:

I've been doing more thinking about the control point mismatches that have been plaguing
Subhash (mainly) and me this last week or so. One unexamined clue was the problems I had
in August, where the
control point detectors discovered control points in exactly the same location on each
image. Could this be a problem with the sensor, maybe dirt or flawed pixels? And
conversion to JPEG would be enough to hide
them, but TIFFs are too accurate a
representation?

Tried multiple conversions of August's images, using both CPfind and panomatic. Nothing. I couldn't
reproduce it. OK, that's enough for the moment. I'll wait for Subhash to respond or the
problem to reoccur. Maybe I should convert to TIFF from now on.

I've been using versions of Emacs
for ever, about half the history of digital computers. It's wired into my fingers.
But Emacs hasn't stayed the same. One of the very first things I wrote for
MINCE (“MINCE Is Not Complete
Emacs”), in about 1980, was a set of functions for indenting C sources. When I got
GNU Emacs, I hacked the indentation
macros to match. And gradually the indentation functionality in the Emacs
distribution increased, to the point that it became desirable to change to it.

But how? I have my own style of indentation that nobody
else seems to use, and my attempts to adapt to it
ultimately came to nothing. But now I'm working on FreeBSD code, which uses a modified K&R indentation style completely incompatible
with mine, and I'm continually running into trouble with indentation issues. Surely
somebody else must have solved this issue.

Did some searching and found precious little in the way of specific settings. The best was
probably Tony Finch's
file, which is very detailed, but over 10 years old. Tried it anyway with little
success. More RTFM until my eyes went funny. I wish this documentation were better. By evening I
had something that didn't look too bad, but it still needs improvement.

So: I have removed two parts of the bread I baked in the “non-stick” pan 2 days ago. Both
were in tatters when I got them out. But about 40% was left behind, and I was able to get
an egg slice under the bottom and get it out almost intact. What an effort!

Lying in bed this morning while Yvonne was in the shower, and
heard the UPSs go off: another power
failure. That's bad news for Yvonne, since the house water supply is run by electric
pump. And it didn't come back after the normal 2 or 3 seconds for a transient power
failure.

Grumbling, into the office to report the problem, which went relatively smoothly. Then
outside and saw the pilot light on this terminally stupid Sony mini-radio in the kitchen:
it's on when the device is off, and goes off when the device is on. But it was on: we had
power again. And then it occurred to me that the UPS in the office was quiet, so probably I
reported the problem after power had come back. OK, ring them up again. Press menu item 2
to report a fault, menu item 3 to really report a fault. And I got terms and
conditions read out to me.

What did I do wrong there? Tried again. This time I listened to the message: it knew that
power was down, estimated time for restoration of service 13:00—over 4 hours in the future!
Tried item 3 again—again I got terms and conditions!

Third time lucky. It seems that if you have already lodged a fault, you can't just contact
an operator: you have to wait until one answers. So I did that and spoke to Christie and
told her how much trouble I had had getting back in contact with them. “OK, if you're
having trouble, just press menu item 1 and you'll get connected directly”. I knew that, but
it's good to hear it from an operator: now I have an excuse to fake a “life-threatening
emergency”. Also asked why the estimated repair time had now increased from 2 hours to over
4. “It's always been 4 hours”. Not in my recollection, but she was clearly not the person
to talk to, so asked for a call back from Eddie Barkla, reported the clarification of the
fault.

To my surprise, Eddie called back within 2 hours, to tell me that the message was misleading
and that Christie's statement was “not entirely correct”—in other words, wrong. OK, I can
live with that. But it's good to document it.

Lots of new flowers in the garden, but the weather's been pretty moist, so I took photos
from the protection of the verandah. That means telephoto lenses, and that means focus
issues. So I took two photos from the same place with different focus, intending to merge
them to show both foreground and background in focus:

The problem is that the images are of different size , as can be
clearly seen by running the mouse over either
image. How did that happen? At first I suspected user error, but
the EXIF data shows that both images were
taken at a focal length of 78 mm. The real problem is that the size of the image changes
with focus. And I'm not sure how to get enfuse to handle that.

Continued playing around with my Emacs indentation macros today, and finally got not just what I wanted, but
more. Now I can finally place the braces where I want
them, indented with the block which they delimit:

Getting there was confusing. I still find the GNU documentation hard to read. The real
issue is that c-mode does its own primitive parsing of the source, the grammar isn't
immediately apparent, and the examples don't help. It seems I needed to address different
variables for the opening and closing braces above: the opening brace above is controlled
by substatement-open, and not by block-open, while the closing brace is
controlled (at least) by block-close.

In addition, found a way to highlight various kinds of white space. The biggest problems
I've had with FreeBSD sources is that I
continually mix up tabs and spaces, and in the past often committed sources that had
trailing white space. Now I can highlight both trailing white space and tabs—mainly. Spent
some time trying to work out why the macros weren't inserting tabs before indented comments,
and discovered that they were, but c-mode wasn't displaying them. Searching for tabs
highlights them in a different colour, and it highlights them all (second image):

That's a bug, clearly, one that I don't want to search for. At any rate things are a lot
easier to handle now. Here's the source, which
probably depends on contents of other files.

A number of web references helped. This page explains highlighting
white space, and this page talks about colour themes, which could be handy. In addition, this page shows the actual colours,
which really have more to do with X than they do
with Emacs.

Somehow Yvonne discovered that there was a mass garage sale
in Enfield today: a total of 14
separate sales, all to the north of the village proper in the areas where we had been
looking for property. In fact, one of the sales was in a house that we had looked at a few
months back.

Off to take a look. It seems that a number of households had got together to persuade
people from Ballarat that it was
worthwhile to make the journey, and apparently it was worth the effort: by the time we
arrived, in mid-morning, a lot of the stuff was already gone. It's amazing how varied
things were. Some people had lots of baby clothes, another motorbike clothing, others
assorted junk. At one place bought some vehicle ramps, which Yvonne thought might be
useful. They also had a kind of toaster I haven't seen since we lived
in Nunawading in the early 1950s, and
which I knew as a “griddle grill”. Mainly out of nostalgia, bought it for $1. At another
place bought some wicker furniture and a brand-new
double-bladed Mezzaluna with its own
chopping board. Total expenditure $39.

The weather this morning was not good enough for my house photos, and I had planned to put them off until tomorrow, but by mid-afternoon
things had picked up, and I managed to get them done. This time I had decided to
create TIFF images, after a suggestion from
Subhash. Not easy: I needed to modify most of my scripts, and there were all sorts of
problems. DxO
Optics “Pro” creates TIFF files which are dubious to say the least. Here's what
ImageMagick's ambiguously
named convert has to say:

And xv doesn't want to know at all.
I should have remembered that from last time.

But this time I persevered. convert creates two output files! If I give it a target
file name, say, garden-centre-0.tiff, I end up with
files garden-centre-0-0.tiff and garden-centre-0-1.tiff. The latter's a
thumbnail that I really don't need, but of course DxO doesn't give me the option of
suppressing it. There must be a way to extract a specific image, but after reading the
documentation I was none
the wiser. Finally I took a cue from the output of identify:

Now isn't that tacky? In addition, it seems that convert doesn't preserve
the EXIF data in TIFF files, so I'll have to
do that manually too.

Converting things to TIFF took forever, and the first panorama results were less than
stellar. Once again I saw control points which seemed completely unrelated. While trying
to recreate them, managed to destroy the project file, and I had other things to do, so
added conversions to JPEG to the workload
and left it overnight to complete.

As if the photo processing wasn't frustrating enough, a couple of other things ganged up to
annoy me. After this morning's excursion, put the GPS navigator on to charge, and came back
a little later to see the charge indicator showing purple—normally it's red (for charging)
or blue (for charged). And the thing didn't work. More playing around brought a bright,
uneven screen, which then died. Resetting helped enough to get the thing to start booting
before crashing. And when I reconnected the charger, it didn't charge. All suggests a dead
battery, which isn't user-replaceable. I've only had the thing 18 months—looks like I need
a new one.

In addition, I had turned on teevee, my TV display computer, to copy files to it.
But it didn't show up on the network. Turned the projector to see what was wrong and saw
something like:

Can't find kern...

That kern... should have been kernel, of course. Further investigation
showed that the system disk had died. It's 1 TB, and I didn't make backups of it (most of
it is recorded TV programmes). Put it in dereel and was able to access it for about
10 minutes, after which it just died again. Another electronics issue. Maybe I'll be able
to extract things piecemeal, leaving it to cool down in between.

We have a Philodendron planted in
the dining room. Recently I discovered that one of them had stuck an aerial root over the
edge of the pot, and it was growing away from the window. Yesterday I put the first thing
that I could find (portable telephone) next to the end of the root, and today it had grown
this far:

Into the office this morning to continue with my photo processing. The remainder of
the photo processing with DxO Optics “Pro” had taken
6 hours, 12 minutes, and just copying
the TIFFs and reinstating the EXIF data took
20 minutes. Processing with TIFF is really slow. I should do some comparisons to see
whether it's worth it. This time I gave up and tried it
with JPEG instead. Eventually got all but
one panorama processed, the “garden centre” one, which suffered because of the light wind.
Interestingly, the control point detection was even worse with JPEG than with TIFF, but at
least one of the control points in the TIFF was completely wrong, half an image apart. I
still can't get past the suspicion that there's some bug in the control point processing of
TIFFs.

Spent quite some time attending to yesterday's hardware failures. In the case of the GPS
navigator, there's an alternative to assuming the battery is dead: what if it didn't get
charged? The indoor charger is a generic USB device, but the one I used wasn't the one it
came with, and it looked a little anaemic. So I tried the correct one and—it worked! One
problem solved, one to go.

Into town to buy a new disk. After some consideration, it made sense to buy a 2 TB external
drive with USB 3.0 connection and use it for photo backups. It's becoming clear
that eSATA is no longer a viable option. I
have two 2 TB drives for photo backups, but the housing of one of them died within warranty.
I returned it to “bare bones” MSY for
replacement a year ago, but they don't want to know. They claimed it was out of warranty,
and I'd have to expend more effort than it's worth to get them to replace it. It's just not
worth doing business with people like that.

Apart from that, MSY is in Geelong, and
just getting there would add $20 to the cost. Their cheapest costs $119, so I'd be looking
at $140 odd. To my surprise, discovered that Officeworks in Ballarat have 2 GB
external drives (possibly the same one as MSY offers) for $99. It's amazing how cheap they
are by comparison. Staticice suggests that they're pretty much the cheapest apart from specials. Checked JB HiFi as well, but their disks started round the $139
mark. So I bought the disk at Officeworks.

Back home and started on a long rearrangement of disk space. First step is to back up the
photos to the new disk: 1.5 TB across USB 2 at about 15 MB/s takes 100,000 seconds, or about
28 hours. Started that off, then looked for a new disk as an interim measure
for teevee until the final disk is available. Found a 200 GB disk and installed on
that, which went surprisingly smoothly. Apart from the missing documentaries, it's almost
as if nothing had happened.

To my surprise, also found another Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1 TB disk, the same model that
just failed on me. Can I use the electronics to salvage the data on the disk? Possibly,
but the control board on the disk is a different kind, so possibly not. I'll salvage as
much as I can by conventional means first.

So now I have this nice white space highlighting running
with Emacs, and it's a great
improvement. Only one problem: by default trailing white space is highlighted in red, which
on the one hand is somewhat irritating, but on the other hand a real problem: a single space
at the end of the line looks just like a cursor, and I kept trying to input data there.
Time to change the colour.

But how do you do that? GNU Emacs has changed a lot since I first installed revision 18.39 in late
1989, and it looks like there is a whole new infrastructure around the display. Did some
reading, but there's so much to read, and so much of the documentation relates to
packages that aren't part of base Emacs. In the end, went the hackish way. From
some documentation page established that there's a function customize-face, but it
wanted a parameter FACE. What name should I specify?

So M-xcustomize-face trailing-whitespace was all I needed. And now it's
green, less obtrusive and much more obviously not a cursor. There should be an easier way
to find my way through the documentation. Part of the problem is probably that the face
concept is not quite what I expect it to be.

Mail from Julian Stacey, whom I know from my visits
in München nearly 20 years ago. Though
he's been living there for ever, and is married to a German, he remains somewhat British,
and it seems that he's been maintaining a file /usr/share/calendar/calendar.british,
which should be part of the FreeBSDcalendar program that I'm currently looking at, but somehow it doesn't exist
(/usr/share/calendar/calendar.australia, for example, does exist). The message was
in reply to a message from Peter Tynan, who has been doing something similar for Debian Linux. But his file didn't look very Linux-like:

I queried that, but it seems that Linux doesn't have its own calendar program. Peter
tells me that Debian uses the FreeBSD program, and Red Hat uses the OpenBSD version. To
confirm, on cvr2.lemis.com, my Linux-based video recorder, tells me:

One of the real issues is that much of this calendar information is quite out of date, and
maintaining it is even more difficult if there are dozens of different versions of the
software. I wonder if a central calendar project could get off the ground.

It's been over 10 years since I first tried to find a simplified way of staying up to date
with FreeBSD. I still haven't succeeded.
It's becoming an issue again: teevee is running relatively well, but the installation
is about 18 months old, and it's running firefox 6.0. Not that much of a problem, but for reasons I don't understand
it now pops up an additional “Please upgrade” tab every time I open a new tab. I can't
upgrade from their site, because they don't have versions for FreeBSD, and I can't upgrade
to the latest and greatest because I'd get caught in a dependency nightmare.

In addition, I've been planning to gradually migrate all my systems to amd64. So
why not build a base system in a virtual machine and then copy the root file system to the
new machines, keeping the system-dependent stuff in /home? Well, there was a reason:

It's not clear what difference it makes, since amd64 seems to run in the non-64 bit
version.

So, my current strategy is: a base installation that I can update independently of anything
else, and then install on the alternative root file system of the target machines. Started
that today—it's still a long business.

Into town today for various things, mainly a haircut. But the hairdresser was pretty full
when I looked in, so decided to do it on the way home. The main other issue was Christmas
food: wouldn't a duck or goose be nice? Yes, it would. But all I could find in three
different places were some crumbed duck breasts. Why do Australians not like duck and
goose? In the end gave in and bought a small ham for Christmas Eve.

David Yeardley, Tuyết and Minh Chau are returning on 28 and 29 December, so the Christmas
dinner will be on the Sixth Day, 30 December. Last week I had convinced Chris Yeardley that
her frozen 3.8 kg turkey was too small—under 4 kg the bird is so young that the meat hasn't
fully developed. In addition, David has expressed in the past the opinion that only a fresh
turkey will do, not a frozen one. So I took it back to ALDI, who accepted it back with no issues. But I hadn't
got round to ordering a new turkey. And so I went looking for one for pickup on 29
December.

Davis meats, where we usually buy our meat, scared me. Even now they had exactly one turkey
left: 3.2 kg, frozen. On to Megameats,
who fortunately were able to deliver just what I wanted—fresh, 4.0 to 4.2 kg, for pickup on
29 December. Thank God for that.

Back to the hairdressers. Two people, he on his lunch break. Looks like it'll have to be
another day.

While in town, dropped in at Gays,
coming from the direction of the Botanical
Gardens. My GPS navigator went crazy. The route is pretty much straight down Gillies St,
but it wanted me to turn left and head through Victoria Park. That was with the profile
“shortest route”, which it clearly wasn't, so waiting at the lights crossing Sturt St I
tried “fast”, and it told me to turn right, which is also clearly wrong. Carried on
straight ahead and got there, and it still wanted me drive about 3 km in a circle and then
come back to where I was.

How can that happen? Tried rearranging the route, stopping and restarting the program, but
nothing helped. Of course, when I tried it later, everything worked correctly. I wonder
what went wrong there.

Started doing some weed spraying today, and ran out
of Glyphosate. Never mind, I had a 20
litre canister still half full—that'll keep me going for ever. I thought.

Looking in the garden shed, I found two canisters, both very similar. These things come
with detailed instructions in a plastic envelope, which were missing on both of them. And
that was the only description of the contents! I now have no idea whatsoever what's in each
of the canisters. I'm astounded that our authoritarian State even allows the things to come
on the market like that.

Finally received the Ethernet card that I had bought on eBay nearly a month ago. Why Ethernet card? Thanks to
Powercor, one of my motherboards
(currently running dereel) lost its USB and Ethernet ports, and I'm running it with
an ancient 3com 3C509 PCI card. But it makes
sense to use it as a replacement for cvr2, the video recorder box, which has a much
more powerful processor which I could use to run DxO Optics “Pro” natively,
in the hope that it would then be considerably faster than in a VM. I don't need USB for
cvr2, but I do need Ethernet and 2 PCI slots for the tuners. And this motherboard
only has 2 PCI slots, so for something like $6 including postage I ordered a PCIe card. The
fact that it also does 1000baseTX wasn't really important.

Put the card in dereel and rebooted. It was recognized immediately by the Realtek driver, also by the switch:

That's as good as identical with the probe and Wonderful! Just one problem: I couldn't get
any data across it. ARP on both ends didn't
see anything on the other side. Why? I've never seen a problem like this before.
Discussed what to do on IRC, and in the end decided to try it out in cvr2, which runs
Linux. Even before Linux started, though, I got a configuration menu from the card, which
wanted to try a netboot. Configured it, saved configuration, booted, and it works.

So far so good. But why didn't I get the configuration menu when it was in dereel?
And since that isn't dependent on the operating system, what will happen when I try to
run cvr2 with the card in the current dereel motherboard? Now that it's
configured, will it Just Work? Would it have Just Worked anyway? When I have time and
there's nothing to record, I'll try it out.

Watching TV in the evening, it started raining heavily. Our first thought: would the power
fail? And indeed there were a couple of flickers. So we took a look at the weather radar (we're pretty much
exactly at 270° on the outer circle) and watched the front cross where the power lines are.
I was just saying “It looks like the danger is past” when the power failed, at 20:56. Grrr!

Called up Powercor and spoke to Fiona, who
didn't know of any fault. Had I checked the switchboard? Yes. Were the neighbours
affected? Yes. Had I spoken to them personally? No. What numbers are their houses? I
don't know. OK, she would treat it as an individual fault. Nothing I could say would
convince her. Asked her to get Eddie Barkla to call me—again—and hung up.

Then called in again to see if, in the meantime, anything was known of the fault. Shane
told me that yes, my fault was logged as an individual fault, but 60 other people had also
logged faults. And though they would try to get things fixed earlier, the estimated time
for repair was 01:30—once again, the 4½ hours that Eddie Barkla told me didn't exist! Asked
for a call on that topic too.

Then out on the verandah to cool down. After a few minutes the phone rang. Powercor? Ran
inside to the only functional phone at the other end of the house, and of course it stopped
ringing a second before I lifted up the phone. Called Powercor yet again, and spoke to
Alison, who told me that they almost never call back (though they're very insistent on
having a phone number, and indeed she wanted me to give it to her again, though she had it
on record and on her caller identification display). Not much more information to be had.

Finally to bed, and woke up round 23:45 to discover that power had been back since 23:17,
and I had left a tap on, which was now discharging hundreds of litres of water. What a pain
these power failures are!

Woken up shortly after 02:00 by the UPSs screaming. What, another power failure? I
gradually woke up and powered down the one in the lounge room, which was still going (no
load). Took a long time to get back to sleep, during which the power didn't come back.

At 06:00 got up and rang Powercor again.
Problem known, estimated time to fix 10:00, and that although the fault had been reported at
02:30! Apparently related to the feeder BASO 22, and it affects 208 properties.

Tried in vain to get back to sleep, and eventually up some time after 08:00. Still no
power. Somehow managed to have an approximation to breakfast (no toast, no coffee), and
then decided to go into town to have a haircut, since there wasn't much we could do here,
and I was in desperate need. Decided to wait it out this time, even if there were a number
of people in front of me.

When I got there, there were a total of 6 people in front of me! I really hadn't expected
that, and I gave up my resolution and left again. My guess is that the week before
Christmas is a popular time with the barbers. I'll try again next week.

Back home, and the power had come back at 9:54—nearly 13 hours after it failed! The couple
of hours of power in the middle of the night didn't count, because they just served to keep
me awake. I've had more power failures
in Dereel than all the rest in my life,
even including the far-too-frequent ones in
Wantadilla.

Took the opportunity to rearrange the UPSs so that the big one is in the lounge room. Maybe
it will be able to power the projector when the next power failure hits.

I've recently been trying to take my monthly
garden photo series round the middle of the month, but various things, including the
weather, have held me up. Finally got round to it today. I thought things were looking
good, but a number of things are well behind what things were like this time last year. In particular, there's
no sign of the Kniphofia blooms yet.
Is this because of cooler weather this year? It's hard to say. Still, this year doesn't look bad either.

Call from Eddie Barkla today, in which we discussed much and achieved little. Both power
failures were due to a blown fuse, presumably due to lightning. That seems reasonable for
the first failure, but I thought the weather had passed by the time of the second one. But,
as he said, they didn't know, and they didn't report when they failed. Asked him whether
Ray Nottle had talked to him. He asked
who he was; it seems that Ray knew Eddie, but not the other way around. In any case, he
hadn't, but it wasn't important: today Eddie told me that Automatic Circuit
Reclosers do report faults, but this was a fuse, clearly too stupid to report
anything while it's melting.

And why so long? Eddie thought that 2½ hours was a good response time, this after he had
previously told me that 2 hours was an average time. And he still didn't know anything
about the 4½ hour response time they're now quoting. Clearly their expectations are far too
low.

And why did Fiona ask for all the details about where our letter box is and whether I had
been to see the neighbours? Eddie didn't know, but possibly it was a mistake on her part.
Of course the repair crews have GPS navigators (hopefully a kind that knows where Kleins Road is). So: all in all, I don't really get the
feeling that talking to Eddie helps much. What else can we do to ensure better power service?

While going through TV programmes on cvr2 today, discovered I didn't have any
programme data for PRIME7. That must have
happened the last time I ran the channel configuration through Shepherd. Irritating, but no big deal.

So I re-ran configuration, and then ran mythfilldatabase to get the data. Not quite
what I expected:

That's clearer, anyway. But what does it mean? And why? It appears to
be perl, and I don't do perl. With a bit of
help from people on IRC, established that the LWP::UserAgent referred to a
file, /usr/share/perl5/LWP/UserAgent.pm. But it was there. What was the line
in Common.pm?

$ua->ssl_opts(verify_hostname => 0);

What does that mean? Callum Gibson told me, but why should it fail now? After all, all I
did was to add programme information to the configuration. Was it somehow failing to find
the module? The file wasn't referenced when I started the grabber. Rebooted and tried
again. The problem was still there, but this time the module did get read
by something. Then Callum talked about versioning. He had version 6.04 of the file.
Mine is a much older installation:

It seems that shepherd installed a newer version when I ran it, so possibly it didn't
check the perl module versions first. OK, I had an older version floating around, and how
about that, the line was missing. So I tried commenting it out and running again:

Last week my experiments with TIFF images in
the intermediate processing of panoramas weren't overly encouraging, but I had this
recollection of surprising sharpness in the details while processing the garden centre panorama.
So today I decided to try it again.

I thought that last week I had cleaned up most of the strangenesses in processing TIFFs, but
today I found many more. The really frustrating one seems to be that ImageMagick's convert doesn't
copy EXIF data for TIFFs. I can copy it
myself, but it takes about 30 seconds per image, at least partially
because exiftool copies the
entire image, all 75 MB of it. And things are slower, of course. DxO Optics “Pro” takes on
average about 50 seconds per JPEG image, but
for TIFFs it's more than double that, so spent all day processing images, with the biggest
three still left over at the end of the day. DxO used nearly a day of CPU time:

Christmas is coming, something that's becoming less and less interesting for us. We don't
give presents, we're not religious. And the amazing travesty of Christmas in the
English-speaking world also amazes me: it seems that “Christmas” starts round the first
Sunday in Advent, continues until the
first or maybe second day of Christmas,
and then stops. And the symbol? Santa
Claus, a rebadged Saint
Nicholas!

About the only things that interest us are the Christmas music and Christmas food, the
latter still a bone of contention between Yvonne and myself:
I like traditional European Christmas food, while she thinks it's completely inappropriate
in this climate.

But, although we're pretty much hermits, we still get Christmas cards from a few determined
friends and relative. And we feel bad that we don't respond, but it's really not our style.
On the other hand, some people also put in a letter describing what they've done in the last
12 months. We can do that! But of course in our case it's online. This year, being the first, I've gone a little
further back and briefly described what we've done since we disappeared from sight
in South Australia over 5 years
ago.

That du output is in megabytes: the project used over 45 GB of disk, most of it in
deletable TIFF files. And I don't think I've ever seen a process use an address space of
nearly 12 GB before. And the hour of CPU time that Hugin used is only the tip of the iceberg:
there are also panomatic and nona, which also use lots of CPU time. Who said
that CPUs are fast enough nowadays?

And the results? Good, but still not perfect. In particular the garden centre panorama
was difficult, because it was taken with tone-mapping (3 separate images), and the leaves
moved between the individual images, giving rise to artefacts like this:

I had expected that. I take a range of 5 images at 1 EV intervals, offset by 1 EV, so the
effective exposure offsets are +3 EV, +2 EV, +1EV, 0EV and -1EV. I then tone-map the +3 EV,
+1EV and -1EV images. The +2 EV and 0EV images are just there because I can't avoid them.
But the 0EV image is of course much sharper, and I can use it to fill in the blurred parts:

Spent considerable time on that, not helped by the speed: after all, there were a total of
58 images, nearly 5 GB. And the panorama preview isn't really good enough to see the
details. After finishing the images, discovered that there were still a number of minor
issues which needed addressing. But anyway, they're done, and particularly the animated version looks good. And after removing the TIFFs,
things didn't look quite so bad:

It's been very hot lately—today we had a top temperature of 41.3°, unusual for so early in
the summer. But that's not what my weather software showed:
in fact, it showed nothing. Further investigation showed that the external transmitter
wasn't transmitting the humidity, and that one of the few functions I hadn't written myself,
dewpoint(), wasn't handling 0 humidity correctly,
returning NaN. So for the first time in well
over a year I had to modify the software. It's not done: it seems that the station is also
reporting random incorrect temperatures, over 10° from what they should be. More error
detection and correction needed.

After writing our Christmas letter, the next
thing was to send it, of course. The idea was to post it as status on facebook and also send it as email to a list of people
we know. Yvonne sent me a list of her contacts, and then I
added my own from my ~/.mail_aliases file. How old that is! There are people in it
whom I haven't communicated with for 20 years, and sadly I know of at least 7 who are dead.
The death of Dennis Ritchie is
well known, of course, and at my age you'd expect people to gradually start dying off. But
all but one (Jorge de Moya) were younger: John Birrell, Rob Levin, Dorothy Lustig, Anthony
Rumble and Sue Blake. Sad.

Setting up the mailing list wasn't as simple as I thought. I had intended to use
a mutt alias, but it just Didn't
Work. Mutt didn't complain, but it just sent it out with the To:
address christmas@lemis.com. After some experimentation discovered that there's a
(possibly undocumented) limit to the line length, and beyond that mutt just seems to
ignore it. So I created 5 aliases (christmas1 to christmas5), all with
line lengths round 900 characters, and then a separate alias christmas containing
those 5. That worked, but I had forgotten that mutt expands the list, so all the
addresses appeared on the To: line, not what I wanted.

Still, you can do that with postfix virtual
addresses as well, so I added the lot to my postfix configuration. Still didn't
work! But then, I don't use that facility on my local postfix server, and I didn't
want to start major reconfigurations. Instead I just put it on the external server,
where—finally—it worked. But what a pain. I seem to be losing it.

Another bloody power
failure this morning, at 4:05. Fortunately it was short, just long enough for me to
curse, but it's really frustrating.

Then at 9:22, just before breakfast, we had yet another failure, this time for
17 minutes. That's 21 failures this year, 4 of them in the last 5 days. How can we get
them to provide even marginally acceptable service?

Yvonne wanted me to bake
a baguette for this evening's Christmas
dinner, but I didn't dare, so in the end just baked some more rolls, attempting with little
success to get them oval. Note to self: when rolls rise, they tend to become circular, so
if you want them to be oval, they should start off being exaggeratedly so.

And I had enough for two oven trays. The second one is strange. There are slots in the
area that goes under the rails, which also have bends to match. It seems to be designed to
jam in them:

I needed a lever to get it out. It's clear that this is designed to be some kind of catch,
but why? Maybe the intention is to allow you to pull the tray out and latch it in that
position, but the implementation is terrible.

I had really intended to come closer, but that was at the 60 mm focal length limit of the
lens. Just the job for the new Olympus Zuiko
Digital 18-180mm F3.5-6.3 lens. The following was taken at 105 mm, and others were at
up to 124 mm:

I don't use the various file-sharing services on the Internet. I disagree strongly with the
copyright holders' heavy-handed protection of their rights, but currently they have the law
on their side, and I don't intend to break the law. But more and more it's becoming clear
to me that the whole business is lopsided. I can, for example, buy a DVD or a CD with
multimedia content. I own the medium, but not the content. Recent developments, of course,
get rid of the medium, so I don't own anything. Either way, I am not allowed to give this
content to anybody else, and that's what the file-sharing services do. In some case, I'm
not even allowed to engage in safe practices like backing up the content to guard against
damage to the medium.

But then there are officially sanctioned loopholes, and not the smallest. I can borrow a
DVD from companies like Blockbusters (legal, but cost money), or I can borrow one from the local library (legal, and free). The
same applies to the Oxford English Dictionary. I
bought a copy of the second edition on CD years ago. It
was very expensive, but the only way I knew to get hold of it, and even then I had to
maintain a Microsoft machine just to access it. Then six months ago I found it online at the State Library of Victoria—up to date, with a less emetic interface, and free!

But wait, there's more. There are many other
documents online at SLV. Today I went looking for the history of the stick that
conductors wave in front of the orchestra. In English it's called
a baton, a French word meaning staff. To quote that page, “a bâton is hardly larger than a person”. That doesn't quite apply to the
thing that conductors wave—any more. They did once have things that big in France,
until Jean-Baptiste Lully
banged one on his foot, severely injured a toe, got gangrene and died of the wound.
This
page confirms that this object was called a bâton. After that, there's little mention
of the baton until the early 19th century, by which time it had shrunk to a mere stick
incapable of reaching the feet. The French call it a baguette, a word also used to
mean magic wands, chopsticks and even thin loaves of bread.

So: why does the English word (apparently) still refer to the staff? Went looking online
and found very little to substantiate my assertion that the term refers to the Lully-killer.
But while I was there, found a reference to the Naxos Music Library:
“Online music catalogue with over 50 classical, world and jazz labels including, ABC
Classics, BIS, Chandos and Naxos”. It appears to be all classical music. The first time I
skimmed over that, I was left with the impression that it meant 50 CDs. By no means: there
are over 80,000 of them! And they're well sorted, and available online, and free!

That doesn't mean that they're available to anybody, of course. You need to be a member of
the SLV—that's free, too. The only criterion is that you should be a resident
of Victoria. Even that
isn't as restrictive as it looks. The collection isn't part of the SLV, any more than the OED is. They (and many others)
are available to library members around the world. You only need to be a resident of
Victoria to access the collection via the SLV. Elsewhere there's probably some other
library that will grant you the same access.

Looking at this from a conventional, pre-information-age standpoint, all this makes perfect
sense. Lending libraries have been around for centuries. With the advent of digital media,
it's clear that they got involved with lending more than conventional books. What doesn't
make sense is that the copyright holders accept such use on the one hand and come down so
heavy-handedly on people who share media on the Internet. When will they learn?

After accepting the failure of my previous ways of trying to keep up to date with FreeBSD, continued today with the virtual machine
approach. I had a base machine with no ports. How should I install them? There's this
thing called PKGNG (“Package New
Generation”) which should enable me just to download binary packages, and thus eliminate
this eternal configuration that the Ports
Collection requires. Problem: As a result of a recent security incident, no official
packages are available. So for the time being, at any rate, I have to download binary
packages the old way, with pkg_add -r. I already had most of the infrastructure for
that in place, but discovered I had never put it to the test. In principle, this should
install all the packages mentioned in a file /home/Sysconfig/myports:

make packages

In practice, discovered that my scripts weren't complete. They didn't check whether a
package was installed before trying to install it, and the names I chose for the packages
didn't always match the names that the FreeBSD project uses. That's not surprising: in
fact, it's surprising how few differences I found. So spent some time tidying that up, and
made moderate progress. But under these circumstances I need to reconsider the sequence in
which I do things. In any case, I'm making progress.

There's so much to do in the garden! Most importantly, I need to look at the irrigation.
Started on that and discovered I'm out of drippers, so put it off until Thursday. And by
that time my energy had dissipated, so didn't do anything else either.

After my experience with Subhash's panoramas a couple of weeks ago, I was interested to see
this thread in the
Hugin mailing lists. Another case
where somebody had extreme difficulties assembling a panorama. He made his images
available, so I had a try. Once again, It Works For Me:

He had had more difficulties, but had managed to get past them. But his image is different.
Yes, it's not cropped, but if it were, parts would be missing that are present on my image.
Then I thought of what Subhash had said: “Does Hugin have a random number generator built
in?”. So I tried running cpfind 4 times. The results:

Control points

Average error

Max error

924

2.0

6.1

924

1.9

5.4

919

1.9

5.5

919

1.9

5.4

Looking at the project files showed multiple differences. Why? For the fun of it, tried
again with panomatic. The results were the same for each run: 758 control points,
1.9 pixels average error and 7.3 pixels maximum error. But again there were minor
differences in the control points.

Everything looks different! Far fewer control points (is that a setting in the
preferences?), worse match, and the second attempt was far worse than the others. So he ran
with APS-C, which I don't have, and got the same results each time: (only) 98 control
points, 5.1 pixel average error, 19.7 pixel maximum error. Then I tried again with
Autopano-sift-C and got some really interesting results: 214 control points,
average error 153.7 pixels, maximum error 4362 pixels!

In the winter I planted some seeds
of Mirabilis jalapa, most of
which germinated, grew and... died. After throwing some away, discovered that they had
grown a substantial sized corm, so planted some and left others where they were. I also had
some corms left over from last year. One I planted in a pot, others in the garden.

Their progress has been remarkably varied. The one in the pot is now almost flowering,
though something (wind?) broke off one of the stems:

In addition, a couple of pots on the verandah have grown some plants, presumably self-seeded
from last year. By contrast, the ones in the garden are not doing at all well. The ones
from this year have disappeared from view entirely, and the ones from last year, which
should look like the ones in the pots, are very unhappy:

Continued installing packages on my FreeBSD reference virtual machine today. With a couple of minor issues, it went very
well, much faster than compiling ports. That's not only because I didn't need to
compile: I also didn't need to answer configuration questions, nor address strangenesses in
the build. And it used the best part of 2 GB of traffic. About the only hold-up was that
postfix wanted me to answer a question
about the default mail configuration.

Things aren't over yet. A number of these packages printed out information, some possibly
important, that scrolled off the top of the screen. A good thing that I've saved a
transcript of the installation. Hopefully PKGNG will handle this better (send a mail message to the installer, for example,
like System V.4 did 20 years ago). Tomorrow I should go through the lot and see what else I
need to do.

I've been meaning to have my hair cut for several weeks now, but each time I went into the
barbers, there were really long queues. In again today; once again there were lots of
people, but it proved all to be a single family, and the only one having his hair cut was
half finished. So finally I got round to it, and the barber confirmed that before Christmas
is always a bad time (or, I suppose, a good one for him).

Didn't do much else in town. Picked up some parcels from the post office for Yvonne, and bought some drippers and dripper line for the garden.

What happened there? Some idiot got let loose in the garden with secateurs. I had trimmed
the roses, and in the process found some old, dead clematis stems and cut them off. Dead
indeed! Well, they are now. That's exactly what I did in August with the ornamental vine. When
will I learn?

Recently I heard a radio programme
about Louis Spohr in Graham Abbott's
Keys to Music series. He mentioned
that his first clarinet concerto (1808) was so demanding
that Simon Hermstedt, to
whom the work was dedicated, had to “modify” his clarinet to be able to play it. Went
looking: now that I have access to the Naxos Music Library, I
could listen to it. It also comes with a PDF of the booklet that accompanies the physical
CD, which also makes mention of the matter:

Some of the music turned out to be impracticable on the clarinet, but rather than
insisting on the composer modifying it, Hermstedt adapted his instrument, expanding the
number of keys from five to thirteen.

Well, at the time the clarinet normally had 6 keys, and some time later it had 13. But was
all this the work of Hermstedt? Or did the author of the booklet make some assumptions?
It's fairly well documented that the 13 key clarinet was developed
by Iwan Müller and first presented in
1812, and an important requirement was the invention of the modern pad (also by Müller): the
old leather coverings just didn't cover the holes well enough to make it practical to have
that many keys.

But a couple of references say that the original score included a description of the
modifications. Went looking for the score, and at this Public Domain Music site I was successful. I can only agree with Hermstedt. I can't
play it on a modern instrument. Unfortunately, what I got didn't include the notes on the
modifications. Looking in Jack
Brymer's “Clarinet”, I can find no mention of Spohr or Hermstedt, not helped by the lack
of an index. There's also no mention on this clarinet history page.

There's so much work to do in the garden! And the weather is right for it. But somehow I
didn't get much done—put in a couple of sorely needed drippers, transplanted a couple
of Fuchsias, caught a couple of fish from
the pond to give to Chris, and that was about it.

Why am I so lethargic? It's not age; reading my diary from 45 years ago (early 1968, part
that I will probably never put online), it seems I went through similar periods in those
days. I suppose that's some comfort.

Yesterday I took a couple of not-very-good video clips of Yvonne and Chris riding horses. Yvonne wanted to join them together, something that I've tried
before with only
limited success. Finally got round to writing a minimal script to do the joining, in the
process determining that yes, indeed, there's some problem with the avidemux2 audio. So mencoder it is:

It's been over a week since
I got the new Ethernet card, a prerequisite to swapping the bodies of dereel (test
machine) and cvr2 (TV recorder). The latter machine is much faster, just what I need
to install Microsoft on and run DxO Optics “Pro” at a
bearable speed. The problem is that the Ethernet chip on the dereel motherboard was
damaged thanks to a Powercor power surge.
Thus the new Ethernet card.

Problem: it didn't work in the motherboard for which it was intended. It worked fine
in cvr2, but that has a functional interface on the motherboard. Was it the
difference between FreeBSD (dereel) and
Linux (cvr2)? Took the disk from cvr2 and put it in dereel. Same
symptoms: interface shows up, claims to be running, but passes no traffic. It should also
have shown a configuration screen, which happens at
POST time, so nothing to do
with the operating system. Messed around in the BIOS settings and disabled the (defunct)
on-board interface. Bingo! It worked.

So then moved the tuners to the new motherboard. Or at least, I tried to. Either one
fitted in one PCI slot, but the other was blocked by a row of capacitors. And both tuners
have an S-Video connector in that
position:

My lethargy continues, but I did get some work done today. Finally planted
the Myoporum parvifolium
(“Creeping boobialla”) that I had bought back in August. They're supposed to be
drought tolerant (“hardy”), but putting them in the garden at this time of year without any
water would be stretching that term somewhat. So put in some drippers as well.

While looking at that, noticed that the row
of Calendulas that I had planted on the
east side of that bed were looking decidedly unhappy, despite the drip line that I had given
them. Further investigation showed that the drip line was completely clogged up. And of
course there's no way to clean it. What a waste of time and money! I suppose it's related
to our bore water, which contains some soluble iron compound that precipitates in the lines.
Probably the drip line is fine if you have the luxury of pure water, but it's clearly not
suitable for bore water. Punctured some holes in it with a nail, which will let some water
out. I suppose I need to look at all the drippers now.

Did the weekly house photo series today,
because the weather was better than yesterday. And for the fun of it tried a
higher-resolution panorama of the verandah. It doesn't
make much difference for the normal view on the web, but the animated panorama version can zoom in really close, and at
normal resolution it becomes fuzzy. So today I took the images at 18 mm focal length
instead of 9 mm.

Normally I take 2 rows spaced at 45° and a zenith photo; I still haven't found a
satisfactory solution for the nadir. At twice the focal length I should theoretically need
4 rows spaced at 22.5° and a zenith. In practice, my little
program tells me:

So for a 30% overlap I should set it to 28° increments. That's closer to 30° than 22.5°, so
that's what I chose. And it was enough. I also took 3 rows and found I was pointing almost
to the zenith, so I took a single zenith shot, a total of 37 images. That wasn't enough: my
zenith was smaller too, of course, and it didn't touch the third row anywhere that I could
recognize. So no 180° panorama.

Even more frustrating is that under these circumstances I can't create a correctly
dimensioned equirectangular image At All. And without it, SaladoPlayer can't convert the images. So
far from a high resolution animated panorama, I got none at all.

Even worse, the panorama didn't fit together well. It's been a long time since I have had
this kind of discontinuity:

More garden work, and finally got round to spreading more mulch in the eastern part of the
east garden. But now summer's coming, and the flies are coming with it, so didn't stay out
very long, though later I found time to do some weeding. I wonder if I'll ever get the
upper hand.

I was particularly impressed by the turkey, which was cooked just right—the meat just fell
off the leg bones, without the breast meat being too dry. For the eventuality that
Yvonne will allow me to cook another turkey some day, the
roasting details: turkey 4.2 kg, baked at 130° for 3½ hours, then raised to 180° for another
½ hour to brown a bit. And interestingly we nearly finished it.

Another impressive thing was a cake that Chris had had made. A “welcome to Australia” for
Tuyết and Min Chau, who are staying here now:

I was particularly impressed by the detail of the screws in the second image. It was made
by the wife of one of the people Chris beats up
at BJJ every week. Locals will notice
the Eureka flag alongside
the Australian flag.

Still more laziness today. Did some work in the garden, but again the flies irritated me.
At least I'm now making progress removing the weeds under the birches in the middle of the
east garden. Also collected some bulbils
from one of my mystery flowers, the one I thought might be
a Chasmanthe floribunda,
but which on further research is probably
a Watsonia meriana
var. bulbillifera:

After reading up on that, especially this one, I wonder if I should be trying to grow them at all. But it's interesting
that that (Government) description notes that it's a garden plant. It's amazing how one
man's ornamental is another man's weed. 18 months
ago I bought some seeds for Anchusa
capensis, which didn't come up very well, but it seems that they have self-seeded, and
they're coming up again. But how pretty are they?

It didn't stay that way, though, and so I tried again, this time removing and replacing the
(USB) modem. That seems to have done the job, though the RSSI was very low, typically 3 to
4, which seems marginal enough that it could have caused it to switch to a GPRS cell. To be
monitored. But how I wish we could get the Radiation Tower!